Hi All,
I took the IBM XML 142 exam on Saturday and passed it with 75% score. Thanks to this javaranch forum for providing lot of information/tips related to this exam.
I am sharing my exam experience also here, which might be useful to some of you in preparing for this exam.
- Started with
http://www.w3schools.com which is an excellent site for beginners.
- I bought two books XML in a Nutshell 3rd edition and Professional XML 2nd edition and read all the relevant chapters
- Gone through the IBM 5 part series multiple times. Here is the link
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/views/xml/libraryview.jsp?search_by=xml+related+technologies+certification+prep - For some chapters like XQuery, XForms, Security, I followed the documents that are available on IBM's developerWorks site.
- Gone through the examples available on
http://www.zvon.org - Took the sample test available on IBM site, just one week before the exam and got 71.43% in this exam. (Please note that this exam costs $10, but it is worth taking this exam)
Here are some of my observations..
- Just reading the material may not be sufficient. You need to execute the samples on a computer to get a better understanding.
- The time alloted for the exam is just sufficient. But, I think you should not spend too much time on a single question which might take up lot of time (like recursion questions). You can mark the question and move on to the next questions which might take less time. Once you are done with all the simple questions, you can go back to the questions that you marked earlier.
- The most important topics are XML Schema, XSLT, XPath, DTD, SAX & DOM.
- There are lot of questions that will provide an XML Shema/DTD snippet and ask you to choose the correct answers which are valid according to the given schema/dtd.
All the best for your exam!!
Thanks,
Chandra
[ June 21, 2008: Message edited by: Chandra Atla ]
[ June 22, 2008: Message edited by: Chandra Atla ]